Recent spikes in prices of rice, soy, wheat and corn have driven many poor people in developing countries into hunger and malnutrition. In 2011, then World Bank president Robert Zoellick estimated that 44 million people fell into poverty in 2010 due to rising food prices, adding, “Food price inflation is the biggest threat today to the world’s poor…one weather event and you start to push people over the edge.”

The dots connecting world hunger, weather events and speculation on global financial markets are obvious. Yet, well-meaning officials at UN agencies, including the FAO, World Bank and IMF, are curiously blind. Instead, their many urgent meetings over the past three years have focused on raising more money to pay these rising prices for food staples, urging more productivity from agriculture and opposing nations curbing exports to protect their domestic foods …. MORE A VIP READ: The Economics of Curbing Speculation In Food, Water and Vital Resources

If we want to manage the world for future generations, we need to define what kind of world that should be. Credit: NASA

ACHIEVING A MORE SUSTAINABLE world presupposes a worldview that considers well-being not only in terms of income, but also in terms of human security and opportunities for every person to thrive. It is worth considering what the world would look like from such a perspective.

For starters, it would be a world in which people live free from conflict over land, water, and space; and that ensures food security for the 739 million people who are hungry or malnourished today. Such a world would preserve the 20,000 species of animals and plants that face extinction, understanding their power to heal us physically and spiritually. It would draw us back from the brink of unstoppable global warming and its consequences for coastal communities, weather patterns, and, in some regions, habitability. It would protect sites of extraordinary natural beauty and inspiration. And, for future generations, it would be a world that is more sustainable than ours…. Think globally, act globally – Opinion – ABC Environment Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

A four percent increase in Amazon deforestation has led to a 50 percent increase in malaria because mosquitoes, which transmit the disease, thrive in the cleared areas.

By David Suzuki with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Editorial and Communications Specialist Ian Hanington.

We’ve long known that environmental factors contribute to disease, especially contamination of air, water, and soil. Scientists are now learning the connection is stronger than we realized.

Preventing illness is the best way to get health care costs down. So why aren’t governments doing more to protect the environment? We’ve long known that environmental factors contribute to disease, especially contamination of air, water and soil. Scientists are now learning the connection is stronger than we realized…. more

One World

One Humanity

One Environment

The Common denominator among all living things

IS NATURE

Finding A Way For The Greater Good

An Urgent Task

OUR HOME: We Live on a Wondrously Diverse Planet and We are a vital, integral species within the Magnificent Web of Life not separate from it. Nature needs us. Let us Honor and Respect That

THE GREAT AWAKENING

In just over 250 years we have consumed or destroyed what took millions and millions of years to evolve…

We now understand that the majority of life on Earth has never been – and will never be – known to us. In a staggering forecast Edward O Wilson, eminent Harvard biologist, predicts that our present course will lead to the extinction of half of all plant and animal species by 2100…. – “Animal Extinction – The greatest threat to mankind”

Over the last 60 odd years we have become preoccupied with, and fixated on ourselves, our man-made lives of production, indiscriminate consumption and lust for profit. self-gratification and status. In this process we have increasingly excluded from our daily decisions and equations the well-being of others and Nature’s life supporting eco-systems. We can now see how this myopia has wreaked havoc upon both our environment and all species with in it –our societies, our communities and ourselves.

While we were flying high our natural world (and us) began to get sick, really sick . Greed took over from compassion, and wealth negotiated itself more wealth at the expense of the average man, woman and child setting the stage for a global uprising and reawakening.

We forgot our deep and profound responsibility to care for and nurture the greater whole. We forgot that we abide in Mother Nature’s womb, dependent on Her every second of every day. Just as we depended on our mother for nurturing and sustenance while in her womb, we depend on Mother Nature’s health, abundance and generosity for our daily nurturing and sustenance and FOR SURVIVAL as a species. This amnesia has resulted in us almost consuming ourselves out of existence and, in the process, we have lost our connection to community, to each other and to the essential natural processes of life.

EXTINCTION CRISIS – ECOLOGICAL ARMAGEDDON

In 40 Years HALF world’s wild animals have been wiped out:

Without Nature We Do Not Exist. Period

It is an illusion to expect healthy, balanced lives without a healthy, balanced natural world. Her health is our health

While we were flying high our natural world (and us) began to get sick, really sick . Greed took over from compassion, and wealth negotiated itself more wealth at the expense of the average man, woman and child setting the stage for a global uprising and reawakening.

A Perfect Storm is approaching – a combined environmental, economic and social collapse UNLESS we change our attitudes and priorities in life NOW, and even then, we may well have passed the tipping point of what our biosphere can handle.

The major difference this time, than the Great Depression or any other time in human history, is the environment – its massive degradation and depletion by man – the degree of which has never before been seen on this planet – and the cumulative effect is the cause of Climate Change.

We depend upon a healthy, balanced natural world for our very existence – as does all life. Our eco-systems have been plundered, pillaged and polluted to a point, in some cases, of no return; species are disappearing at an alarming rate totally destroying the biological and crucial biodiversity balance of the planet. Our common life’s values and the dignity of cultures have been dismantled as we gave ourselves over to the Age of Consumerism. When Drilling for Oil has become a greater priority than clean water and healthy food, we have no choice but to revisit our values in life. What we do and choose now will set the destiny of humankind for centuries to come.

Will the children who inherit the Earth, and the potential issues that might still remain unresolved, feel the innate desire to preserve it? Or is our connection to nature being lost? This interesting and thought provoking concept was introduced to me by Kim Marshall McLean, a PhD classmate of mine at George Mason University and a NOAA Biologist. Kim is researching how exposure to the outdoors and the lessons learned in nature shape our understanding and even our intelligence. The sociological and environmental information gathered from this kind of research is far reaching and has implications for business as well. It is the hope that future leaders, especially those in business, will retain the close kinship with nature.

Get Ready for the Ride of Your Life

Given that it takes hundreds of thousands to millions of years for evolution to build diversity back up to pre-crash levels after major extinction episodes, increased rates of extinction are of particular concern, especially because global and regional diversity today is generally lower than it was 20,000 years ago as a result of the last planetary state shift. … Possible too are substantial losses of ecosystem services required to sustain the human population. … Although the ultimate effects of changing biodiversity and species compositions are still unknown, if critical thresholds of diminishing returns in ecosystem services were reached over large areas and at the same time global demands increased … widespread social unrest, economic instability and loss of human life could result

Whee!

How close are we to such a global state shift? One way to conceptualize it is to visualize the percentage of the Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems that have seen local state shifts:

“Our society needs a new story to belong to. The old story of empire and dominion over the earth has to be looked at in the full light of day – all of our ambient cultural stories and values that we take for granted and which remain invisible must become visible.”

Film offers us a powerful tool to shift awareness and inspire action. It offers a method to break our dependence on the mainstream media and become the media ourselves. We don’t need to wait for anyone or anything.

Just imagine what could become possible if an entire city had seen just one of the documentaries below. Just imagine what would be possible if everyone in the country was aware of how unhealthy the mainstream media was for our future and started turning to independent sources in droves.

Creating a better world really does start with an informed citizenry, and there’s lots of subject matter to cover. Our country has to come to terms with the true history of the United States. It has to learn about basic ecology. It needs to understand some basic truths about peak oil and the monetary system, the truth about capitalism and governments.

Nature – The Great Teacher

Michael O’Malley, vice-president of human capital at Sibson Consulting, took up beekeeping as a hobby and was surprised to find that it provided insights into his day job of advising on risk management.

WE NEED OUR BEES, ALIVE NOT DEAD

O’Malley writes in the Harvard Business Review that beehives are structured for long-term growth and as a result the pollen gatherers have become masters of risk management, unlike many “too big to fail” banks.

He writes: “When a colony gets too large, it becomes operationally unwieldy and grossly inefficient and the hive splits. Eventually, risk is spread across many hives and revenue sources in contrast to relying on one big, vulnerable “super-hive” for sustenance.”

Other lessons he has taken from his hobby are that queen bees do not appear to be subject to short-term quarterly pollen and nectar targets. “No queen bee is under pressure for quarterly pollen and nectar targets. The hive is only beholden to the long term. Indeed, beehives appear to underperform at times because they could collect more,” he writes.

Instead, decision-making is decentralised with individual bees empowered to take decisive action, bolstered by a “disciplined career development program”: “By the time bees are sent into the field, they are prepared — and, even then, novice foragers are frequently accompanied by veterans who show them how to efficiently and productively move among, and work, the flowers.”……More

CAN LIFE BE OWNED?

Rachael Carson was Right in her classic novel “Silent Spring”. This Canadian documentary is one of THE Best explanations of what is happening to the state of our planet with the biotech juggernaut racing across our environment, leaving an irreversible destruction in its wake. Our ecosystems, environment and human health and the future of our planet is at stake and I strongly urge you to take the time to listen and watch the entire Canadian expose. It is both educational and global in its reach.

Monsanto invents, produces and sells genetically modified seeds. As a chemical producer of saccharin and caffeine founded in 1901, Monsanto (and Dow Chemical and Diamond Shamrock) manufactured the highly poisonous herbicide and defoliant Agent Orange for the war in Vietnam which was excessively used. About 80 000 m³ of Agent Orange was sprayed across South Vietnam. 4.8 million Vietnamese people were exposed to agent orange, resulting in 400,000 deaths and disabilities, and 500,000 children born with birth defects. Agent Orange also increases the risk of various types of cancer and genetic defects. Shortly after the Vietnam War veterans reported various health complications which can be traced to exposure to Agent Orange. No Vietnamese have ever received any kind of compensation. SEE: “EL EFECTO #MONSANTO – Vietnam (1962-1974) Argentina (1996-????)” ow.ly/6YAQ5. AGENT ORANGE is now being used as a pesticide on our genetically modified food crops.

Monsanto produces Posilac, a hormone to increase milk production of cows. In the US it is used on a third of all dairy cows. In Canada and in Europe it is prohibited because of many side effects and diseases. SEE: “What do Agent Orange, DDT, aspartamine, bovine growth hormone, #GMOs and now, biopiracy all share in common?”MONSANTO: The Leader of the Biotech Chemical Cartel and “Chemical warfare: Horrific birth defects linked to tomato pesticides”ow.ly/6YAQG

Monsanto is world leader in the field of bio-engineering and has branches in 46 countries. 90 percent of the cultivated genetically modified organisms, including soybeans, canola, corn and cotton, are Monsanto patents. The practices of this company worldwide under criticism. “They want to control everything and seed make all the food production in the world their property,” says a farmer on Monsanto.

Understand the game. This huge monolith and juggernaut is consuming all agriculture world-wide, reducing it to a dangerous monoculture loaded with altered genes that this human body is not designed to assimilate. So long as Monsanto can keep research out of the hands of independent scientists, they control not only the research results but all the publicity around it. Monsanto is one of the most powerful and manipulative corporations in the world aligned with the other mega-corporate monopolies. It has the whole world population, the governments and politicians by the throat. They can buy their way into any situation, with huge budgets for lobbying, blackmail, coercion, graft, payola, political contributions and will do anything they have to take over the entire global food supply. You will find in the near future that the global explosion of diabetes and obesity alone all coincide with the sneak entry of gmos into our food supply 20 years ago. The human body is not designed to assimilate this type of toxic geoengineering. An anti-trust issue that no-one or no government is willing to touch…that is how powerful we have allowed Monsanto to become. The issue is not gmos alone, but how it destroys the biodiversity, the soils and life with the pesticides it requires to grow. This has affected our pollinator species declining at a terrifying rate, our water ways and all life in it, and a monoculture of industrial-produced agriculture that has adverse affects on all life….including YOURS. Small farmers are put out of business and have no chance of standing up in the courts against the court-owned Monsanto. The US Dept. of Agriculture is in bed with them and plays the same public relation game of pretending that we all (including small farmers) will benefit. We are fast approaching a tipping point –a point of no return– with Gmo seeding and our entire food supply. Our beneficial insects are killed, birds die when they eat the gmo crops/ insects; bees have been forced fed gmo pollen and we’ve lost 2/3rds of their population (and that goes for almost any species within nature constantly ingesting this diabolical chemically-aligned re-engineering of our natural food. When our cattle are fed genetically modified food it creates changes within them, we then eat it and an implosion of internal modifications begins in our bodies. Every fast food is all gmo; from the bun, to the tomato, to the lettuce, to the pickles, to the meat, to the oil it is cooked on/in. In effect, all life is being affected by this bioengineering of our entire food chain of which we are the end user. Monsanto is closing in fast for global take over by owning all seed that is required for growing food see: Monsanto; seeds; produce – latimes.com http://ow.ly/74fDMonsanto has been known to threaten journalist, and farmers who oppose them as well as the press. How powerful is that !! Once the change is in full operation, which is fast approaching, you cannot put the genie back into the box. What sort of health and life do you want for both yourself and the life forms you eat? Monsanto epitomizes what the Occupy Wall Street revolution is all about….total corporate control of our lives with us having no say due to the corruption within the political and news media systems and the recent Supreme Court ruling giving corporations “citizen’s rights”. Wake Up World…NOW

Farmers Take On Big Ag to reform an industrial animal agriculture system dominated by large corporations ow.ly/740oc @pewtrusts…

WE DIDN’T LISTEN THEN…ARE WE LISTENING NOW?

WAITING FOR MUM by NikolaiZinoviev

It’s a small world: take anybody else on earth, and you are probably linked through six acquaintances. What’s scary is that a similar rule applies to natural life

Stocks of Atlantic cod have reached historic lows, while haddock and other species have been declared commercially extinct. Thriving food webs that were stable for millions of years have in the past 20 been radically altered, and almost three-quarters of the world’s commercially important marine fish stocks are now fully fished, overexploited or depleted. (MORE….

See full film here:

THE FORERUNNER TO “FOOD INC.”

“Life Running Out of Control” by Bertram Verhaag is an absolute MUST WATCH documentary Movie. Produced in 2004 it explains in depth how, even back then, genetic engineering was quietly taking over our global food and animal supply and had been for decades, reducing the gene pools, to a point where it may be irreversible.

The human, animal and environmental health risks are addressed here as well as the dangers and ethics of altering the genes of our food and animals — and thus us. Everything is interconnected and altering the genes of nature has a ripple affect on all of nature, our environment and us as we are clearly witnessing and experiencing today. (See “Urgent Memo To The World” on this blog here)

If you want to know why the environmental and food activists are protesting…this will fill you in. Let’s hope it is not too late.

Economic progress does not have to come at the expense of environmental health.

A new UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) report imagines a future where agriculture is no longer a main emitter of greenhouse gases (GHGs)—agriculture emits anywhere from 13 to 30 percent of total GHGs worldwide. Greening agriculture, states the report, could change agriculture to “a GHG sink, while reducing deforestation and freshwater use by 55 percent and 35 percent.

Could we be facing a future without birds? Our reliance on pesticides has cut a swathe through their numbers. We must act now, argues Kate Ravilious

Birds are a real rarity these days. In his boyhood, he recalls, he would watch the acrobatics of entire flocks as they ducked and dived after insects. But now the skies are silent, barring the hum of the odd airplane. Turning back to his fruit and vegetable patch, he continues the laborious task of pollinating the raspberry plants by hand, gently brushing pollen onto the slender stigmas inside the flowers. In the past, bees, wasps, butterflies and flies would have done this job for him; nowadays such insects are likewise a rarity. Farmers instead resort to robot bees to pollinate their crops: tiny motors, encased in fuzzy fabric, which hover from flower to flower….(more… None flew over the cuckoo’s nest: A world without birds – Nature, Environment – The Independent.

Photo by David Manning/Athens Banner-Herald, via Associated Press - The role of the opossum in suppressing populations of ticks that carry Lyme disease is highlighted in a new study on the ways biodiversity discourages the spread of disease.

Biodiversity in ecosystems, the scientists report in the Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, dampens a pathogen’s ability to spread among humans. A study by a group of biologists, ecologists and medical researchers casts new light on a phenomenon farmers have known for years: the less genetic variety in a crop or a herd, the greater the risk that disease will decimate it…(more) The Less Biodiversity, the More Disease – NYTimes.com.

The authors present evidence that human impacts may be forcing these mutualist systems down unprecedented evolutionary paths.

“With global climate change, evolutionary change can happen very rapidly, over a few years,” said Judith Bronstein, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the UA’s College of Science and senior author on the paper. “That can be a good thing or a bad thing, we don’t know, but people need to start looking at those effects.” … more

ROME, May 21, 2010 (IPS) – Biodiversity in agriculture is about culture. Traditional knowledge and culture are as important as research and investments aver farmers, researchers and academicians who are gathered in Rome to celebrate International Day for Biodiversity. (read rest of article…)

Today we have the simultaneous events of income deflation and food inflation; two high-speed express trains coming down that tracks at each other, a financial crisis colliding with staggering crop losses, which are cutting deeply into available planetary food reserves. Prices of food are again beginning to soar again just as millions are losing the ability to afford a reasonable diet, though little of this is being observed or reported. But soon even the blind will see. (read on….)

Despite promising the world in 2009, biotech corporations have increasingly raised the hackles of scientists and citizens worldwide

2009 was a year in which the biotech industry, Gates and their US Administration allies did everything in their power to drive the world down the GM road, but it was also a year marked by remarkable global resistance.

It was a year too in which the truth emerged more clearly than ever about not just the severe limitations and risks of GM crops, but the viability of the many positive alternatives to GMOs alternatives from which the profit-driven GM-fixation diverts much needed attention and resources. (more…)Was 2009 the year the world turned against GM? – The Ecologist.

MONSANTO CLOSE TO TAKING OVER GLOBAL FOOD SUPPLY

Tactics being employed by Monsanto areslowly destroying the integrity of the global food supply – could be irreversible!

According to Neil Harl, an agricultural economist from Iowa State University, Monsanto now has patented control over 90 percent of seeds and seed genetics, a chilling notion that has far-reaching consequences. Since the company regularly buys up independent seed companies, its competition is dwindling and the prices for its patented seeds continue to rise.

Monsanto’s genetic modification program has reached 95 percent of domestic soybean crops and 80 percent of domestic corn crops. It has plans in the works to insert its patented genes into wheat crops as well, given U.S. farmers agree to use them this time around. These percentages are likely even higher when considering the natural and unintended spread of pollen and seeds from these genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) into conventional or organic fields.

According to a recent Associated Press investigation, agri-giant Monsanto regularly employs business practices that not only aim to eliminate all competition, but essentially position the company as the sole proprietor of all things related to food. While old news to many in the natural health community, the mainstream press is beginning to recognize the world domination tactics being employed by Monsanto that are slowly destroying the integrity of the global food supply. (more) …“Natural News”Monsanto is trying to take over the world food suppl

Genetically modified foods are being approved before we understand their long-term health effects.

In gearing up for the 2010 release of its super-genetically modified corn called “SmartStax,” agricultural-biotechnology giant Monsanto is using an advertising slogan that asks, “Wouldn’t it be better?” But can we do better than nature, which has taken millennia to develop the plants we use for food?